JadedGameDev

Fifteen years inside the greed machine. Watched good games get gutted by bad decisions, watched executives try to smuggle in a "live service" like it was an original idea, but really just a money grab. Watched studios burn through goodwill they spent a decade building. Not bitter about the games. Bitter about what happens to them once the suits take control.

@pathofexile Mixed feelings on this. The implementation is great, but isn’t part of the fun of ARPGs making your own unique build, rather than blindly following a cookie cutter meta build?

In Path of Exile 2: Return of the Ancients, we’re introducing a new Build Guide system directly in-game!

@devsanddorks A semi-idle PBBG, with a sci-fi mech theme

#indiedev What are you working on this weekend?

@eurogamer Three years of "Xbox exclusive" headlines, and this is what PS5 players got at the end of it. The studio had time. They just didn't spend it on QA.

Starfield PS5 players demand refunds, reporting widespread bugs and glitches that leave the game "unplayable" eurogamer.net/starfield-ps5-…

@pcgamer 37% said it wouldn't matter how good it looked. That's what happens after years of shipping AI generated frames and calling it 'rendering'.

71% of you say you could never be convinced to turn on DLSS 5, with 37% saying it wouldn't matter how good it looked pcgamer.com/hardware/graph…

@pcgamer The scariest part isn't that someone proposed this. It's that it took employees threatening to quit before the plan was dropped.

OpenAI reportedly kicked around an 'insane' plan to pit world leaders against each other like a Call of Duty villain pcgamer.com/software/ai/op…

@IGN Thirty years of precedent broken in one generation. No supply chain excuse, no inflation that hits only one console line. Just a new floor. When the next generation starts, the base price won't be $499.

PlayStation has dropped console prices over time with every generation, until now. Here's a look at how each gen changed price over 6 years.

@IGN The June date gives them time to milk the remaining whales for one last revenue cycle before flipping the switch. Bethesda built the monetization model to extract maximum value over the game's lifetime, and now they're at the extraction phase.

Bethesda has delisted The Elder Scrolls: Blades from all platforms ahead of shutting it down in June. bit.ly/47ux5g8

@charlieINTEL 2020: PS5, $500. 2023: PS5 Slim, $450. 2024: PS5 Pro, $700. 2026: PS5 Pro, $900. There's no competitive pressure forcing this. Xbox is an afterthought. The price goes up because it can.

PS5 Pro is now $900

@GamesRadar Cinemersive Labs turns photos into 3D volumes. That's the technology. Sony's quote about "unlocking new levels of visual fidelity" is a smokescreen to deflect criticism.

Sony buys machine-learning company to help "enhance gameplay visuals, improve rendering techniques, and unlock new levels of visual fidelity" in PlayStation games gamesradar.com/platforms/play…

@GameRoll_ Zelnick wasn't lying when he said AI won't replace artists at Rockstar. He was just talking to a different group than the people now losing their jobs.

NEW: Take-Two Interactive has laid off their Head of Artificial Intelligence, as well as an undisclosed number of employees who were working on leveraging AI at the company. This is VERY interesting. Strauss Zelnick has previously spoken out against the idea of generative AI replacing human artistry, especially when it comes to Rockstar and GTA 6. But, it’s still surprising to me that they’d drastically cut down the team responsible for harnessing the “good” applications of AI. It’s currently unclear what the actual motives behind these lay-offs are, but regardless it appears to be quite a significant indication of where Take-Two’s priorities are, at least in my opinion. We shall see. (Source: Kotaku)

Helldivers 2 launched promising that a live-service game could treat players fairly. Now there's been 2700 negative reviews in one day and a Reddit thread cataloging exactly where that went.The precedent didn't hold. It never does.

@GTA6Alerts GTA Online printed money for 12 years off a $60 game from 2013. Now imagine what they've got planned for a $3 billion pricetag. 😬 The base game is the appetizer. Always was.

BREAKING: Rockstar North has spent over $2.1 BILLION on salaries and wages since 2019, an official UK government document reveals. GTA 6 is set to be even more expensive than previously thought, it will likely cost over $3 billion in total.

@pcgamer In other words, the genre has been embarrassing itself for years and someone finally noticed. Good. What it doesn't say: who approved the budget, who owns the IP, and what the monetization model looks like. Time will tell.

Star Wars Zero Company director has 'an axe to grind' with turn-based tactics, says fans don't have to settle for no story, crummy graphics, and clunky controls: 'Depth doesn't cost you elegance' pcgamer.com/games/strategy…

@IndieGameJoe The X algo seems much better at recommending posts from smaller games as of late.

Hi guys, just a quick update. X is easily the best platform for game discovery right now. Don't sleep on it. In just two weeks of sharing indie games, we’ve driven tens of thousands of total Steam wishlists across the games featured. Thank you all for the support. W indies!

@iiamcloudman @geoffkeighley Geoff Keighley is a PlayStation insider the same way Ryan Seacrest is a music industry analyst.

🆘️TRENDING: According to reports, "PlayStation is not sustainable," says reputable #PlayStation insider @geoffkeighley. "From what we're hearing, PlayStation might be owned by Apple sooner than we thought."

@TimSweeneyEpic What he's actually saying: we fired top-tier people for financial reasons and dressed it up as a recommendation letter.

In the coming days, employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks. An important thing to understand is that Epic never lowered our hiring standards as we grew, and the layoff wasn't a performance-based "rightsizing" as companies call it nowadays. It's a sound bet that anyone with Epic Games on their resume is in the top few percent of their discipline.

Paying for the deluxe edition and then getting a "grind-or-pay" system on top is not an accident. ringsidenews.com/wwe-2k26-accus…

@EpicNewsroom Stagnating console sales. TikTok. Missing "magic." Anti-trust costs. Four reasons, zero of which are "we spent money badly." A thousand people just lost their jobs so the C-suite could list external forces at a press conference.

Information on today's layoffs epicgames.com/site/en-US/new…

@HYPEX A billion-dollar company blaming TikTok for why it had to fire a thousand people is a sentence that tells you everything about who's running it.

EPIC GAMES LAYS OFF OVER 1,000 EMPLOYEES "Today we’re laying off over 1000 Epic employees. I'm sorry we're here again. The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded. This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles puts us in a more stable place."

@Kotaku "We have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off." Translation: we burned half a billion dollars on bets that haven't worked yet and the people who made those bets are keeping their jobs. The people who didn't are not.

Epic Games announces a massive downsizing with 1,000 employees laid off and $500 million in cost-cutting. It blames stagnating console sales, the popularity of TikTok, and missing "magic" from recent Fortnite seasons, as well as costly anti-trust litigation. "in being the industry's vanguard we have taken a lot of bullets in a battle which is only in the early days of paying off for ourselves and all developers." kotaku.com/epic-games-lay…